Art Matters | At Frieze New York, Mixing Pleasure with Business

Rikrit Tiravanija's "untitled 2014 (freedom can not be simulated)" is on view at Frieze New York at the booth of Gavin Brown's Enterprise.Credit

The third iteration of Frieze New York, which opens to V.I.P.s on Thursday and to the general public on Friday with more than 190 contemporary art galleries from 28 countries, is one of the world’s epicenters of pleasure for profit. So perhaps it’s fitting that this year the fair’s organizers embraced the pursuit of leisure via the complementary programming installed in and around the tent. “We wanted to interrupt the rhythms of the fair, going from booth to booth,” says Cecilia Alemani, the curator of Frieze Projects, the annual array of artworks commissioned for the fair, and Frieze Sounds, a series of audio works looped in the fair’s V.I.P. shuttles. “It is a marketplace, and we wanted to create a platform where what could be exchanged was also ideas.”

Many of the commissioned works respond to the fair’s location on Randall’s Island Park, a place that in the first year was noted for its remoteness (and the anxiety that getting there can provoke) and now merely seems remarkable for the openness of its spot on the East River. Among this year’s site-specific pieces is a handmade vessel by the New York-based artist Marie Lorenz, partially built from flotsam she collected while traveling by water around the city. As part of her ongoing “Tide and Current Taxi” project, Lorenz will provide alternative transportation around the island during the fair. The ride is not exactly sweat-free, Alemani warns. “You’ll be expected to paddle, so it’s a bit of an activity and a sport.”

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Marie Lorenz's "Tide and Current Taxi" project will be installed at Frieze, allowing fairgoers to cruise around Randall's Island in a handmade vessel.Credit

A 60-page pamphlet distributed throughout the fair, made by Darren Bader and designed to resemble the official event map, compiles a series of absurdist, unrealized proposals for Randall’s Island, including one for sculptures made of soap that could be washed away by water and another that would recreate Vito Acconci’s notorious 1972 Seedbed performance piece, in which he lay below the floorboards of a gallery masturbating, beneath the island’s ferry terminal. The Argentine Eduardo Basualdo sought to respond to Randall’s Island’s many athletic venues, turning a grassy expanse in front of the fair’s North entrance into a full soccer field, with each goal blocked by a screen of glass.

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Masha Alekhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot will be speaking as part of the Frieze Talks series.Credit Erik Lohr for The Voice Project

The poet and founder of the online avant-garde repository UbuWeb, Kenneth Goldsmith, is the keynote speaker of Frieze Talks, the fair’s conversation series; he is perhaps as famous for inspiring young actors to upend their careers (earlier this year he encouraged Shia LaBeouf to declare his retirement from public life and #stopcreating) as for his long championing of “uncreativity” (he once spent months retyping a copy of The New York Times). In the series, Masha Alekhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot will chat with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, and on Monday Joshua Oppenheimer will screen a director’s cut of “The Act of Killing,” his documentary about the mid-1960s Indonesian genocide that, with scenes of perpetrators reenacting their own crimes in full drag, makes the case for camp as a political tool.

Other pieces at this year’s Frieze point to the ways that recreation can provide structure of its own. Eva Kotatkova’s waterfront playground sculptures are at once forms for repose and physical constraints for the viewer’s body. “Meander,” a booth-sized aluminum labyrinth by Allyson Vieira, reconsiders both material and mythology; it will be on display in the Frame section of the fair, which highlights solo exhibitions of work by art-fair newcomers. In another Frame piece, Shana Lutker — whose mirrored installation occupied a prime spot at this year’s Whitney Biennial — creates a humorous theater setting that mines the Surrealist fistfights of the 1920s, when grown adults came to actual blows over the accusation of artistic selling-out. For Frieze Sounds, Cally Spooner recorded a commanding voiceover of stage directions interrupted by improvisatory jazz.

It all serves as a reminder that leisure doesn’t necessarily mean relaxation — especially with at least a half-dozen other fairs taking place in New York at the same time, including NADA, the Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Collective 2 Design Fair, Cutlog, the Outsider Art Fair and the inaugural Downtown Fair. As its annual tribute to a now-defunct artist-run space, Frieze and the arts organization Public Fiction will revive “Al’s Grand Hotel,” Allen Ruppersberg’s legendary hospitality project that ran over six weekends in Los Angeles in 1971. Like the original, this will be a functional hotel, with actual guest rooms, and will also feature a series of happenings in the lobby.

Elsewhere on the island, the Israeli-born artist Naama Tsabar will host “Without,” a free mini-music-festival in collaboration with Tom Tom Magazine, the publication about female drummers. The public stage is the actual floor from an indoor Frieze booth, carved out and relocated. “The fair is a fictional setting,” Alemani says of the installation. “We’re trying to create a new space of interaction.” In other words, many of the projects in Frieze New York might offer small consolation for the event’s own frenetic, transactional nature: space enough for us to worry about something more than just having more.

Frieze New York runs May 9 – May 12 at Randall’s Island Park, New York, friezenewyork.com.